History. Made.

A Project To Make History

The Challenge

Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) integrated in October 2015 to form a new organisation, Historic Environment Scotland (HES).

Such a massive undertaking demanded a new brand, mission and website that could handle the increased amount and range of customer needs, stimulate engagement across a complex user base, whilst also rationalising a legacy estate of websites and applications.

The Objectives

Establish HES as a leading expert in the historic environment

Showcase the expertise, knowledge and experience within HES as the lead public body for the historic environment

Educate and inform users

Provide valuable content and functions to educate a range of users and to cross-sell properties and collections

Provide a smooth and intuitive user experience

Ensure a consistent user journey throughout the HES website

Establish unified digital technology approach

The Insight

Key to the success of this new service was the buy in from all project stakeholders around ensuring the website was designed around user intent and the wider narrative of the new organisation rather than reflecting internal departmental structures.

The website is designed to support user journeys across 36 separate audiences in meeting over 700 user needs.

To ensure the website could successfully achieve this, we engaged very regularly with representatives of all user types in co-design workshops, interviews and testing.

Key Features

A scalable hosting solution using Azure Cloud Services was implemented to handle the potential demand of the new HES online service. The platform responded and scaled automatically to meet high demand without manual intervention.